The political pim pam pum due to the drought takes pause mode. At least in the short term. The Parliament has approved this Thursday by a large majority a bill promoted by Junts that, together with the amendments negotiated with the PSC and ERC and later approved in plenary, leave behind the failure of the water summit on March 31 in the Palace of the Generalitat. An appointment that made water due to the disagreement in the application of sanctions to municipalities with excess water consumption. In any case, the proposal has gone ahead with 100 votes in favor of the PSC, Esquerra, JxCat, Cs and the PP, 15 against the CUP and the commons, and nine abstentions from Vox.
A whole staging of unity in the face of a major problem at the gates of the municipal elections on May 28.
The approval of this bill modifies the decree approved by the Government that the Parliament validated with the sole support of ERC, despite the fact that a large part of the proposals are similar to the points agreed in March in Palau. But the disagreements have been overcome in terms of the necessary investments to face the drought, especially in what refers to the fines. Even so, it escapes no one that the PSC and Junts, with this debate, have raised a fight against the Executive of Pere Aragonès. This has been considered, for example, by Jéssica Albiach, leader of the commons in Parliament.
The president, for his part, has assessed that with “this broad agreement” the electoral battle is left behind. And he has thanked Junts for the initiative. “But the drought continues, and we must adopt the same attitude of sum”, he has warned.
The final formula to reach an agreement has been put on the table by the PSC and ERC. The application of said sanctions is linked to the order for the call for subsidies by the Government. From the publication of this order, a period of one month is set for the municipalities to request the aid. Those who do not claim them and record excessive water consumption would be penalized. In other words, those who show an express willingness to deal with problems in the local network will not be harmed.
With this agreement, the groups have shied away from the dates for the sanctions. At the March summit, he proposed July 1 as the expiration date of the moratorium. The PSC was against the sanctions, but agreed to recognize it until September 1. There was no consensus.
In any case, there are two points to take into account about the penalty system. The first is that this one-month moratorium does not apply to anyone who does not provide consumption data or does not present a drought plan. Figueres, for example, has been one of the municipalities that has recently been sanctioned for a drought plan that it has not presented, despite the fact that June 2020 was set as the limit to register it for the 64 municipalities of the internal basins of Catalonia that exceed 20,000 inhabitants.
The second aspect to take into account is that the Government must put its batteries to prepare the call for subsidies to the municipalities if it wants municipalities with little economic capacity and problems in infrastructure and water pipes to get down to work. Government sources assure that the calls will be public in a relatively short period of time, with which the sanctioning regime could be in force, if there are no unforeseen events, in July.
Precisely, the chapter on investment in infrastructure to improve the water use and supply network had emerged as the last stumbling block. Broadly speaking, the PSC had presented a plan of twenty urgent and necessary works with a greater level of detail than the list proposed by Junts -with thirteen proposals- or ERC -with eight. However, the works suggested by post-convergents and republicans coincide with those of the socialists, so that finally the three groups have voted for each other’s initiatives.
The Government, for its part, already presented at the summit a list of works to some extent coincident with the infrastructures approved yesterday.
The bill also provides for faster emergency hiring. Likewise, an amendment of the PSC is assumed to facilitate action in exceptional areas -currently there are 495 municipalities in Catalonia in this state- and that operators can hire quickly, with prior authorization from the city councils.
